The DRIVE-IN turns 80

It was a Tuesday more than eighty years ago today – June 6, 1933 – that people first drove their cars right up to a screen to watch movies on Crescent Boulevard in Camden, New Jersey. A new form of entertainment was born and Once Upon a Screen remembers once upon a screen in everywhere U.S.A. with a special birthday tribute to the DRIVE-IN theater.

Richard Hollingshead, a movie fan and a sales manager at his father’s company, Whiz Auto Products, in Camden, New Jersey came up with an idea for “Park-In Theaters,” as Drive-Ins were originally called, where patrons could watch movies while sitting in their own cars. He experimented in the driveway of his own house by pinning a screen (white sheet) to some trees, mounting a 1928 Kodak projector to the hood of his car and placing a radio behind the screen for sound. It worked. Hollingshead…